


rainbow fish

by esmeraldablazingsky



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (of a sort), Finduilas Is Gil-galad, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, but minor enough that i thought it rude to tag them all, there are more characters and relationships, weird extended metaphor about uhh fish?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 10:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19149262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esmeraldablazingsky/pseuds/esmeraldablazingsky
Summary: One by one, Gil-galad gives away all her scales.





	rainbow fish

**Author's Note:**

> this is a different interpretation of Finduilas-as-Gil-galad than I usually use, if that matters at all to you

Finduilas Faelivrin was a beautiful fish. A princess fish, loved and loving, and not least for the fact that she gave her scales away. 

For it was the job of a princess to give, and Finduilas was good at it. In peace, in happiness, she could give away scales like candle flames, lighting a thousand others without burning herself out. 

She was aware that there were some whose gifts were running out, who kept to themselves more and more and had not received in too long, but she was not one of them. She had a talent, and everyone knew it. Faelivrin, Faelivrin, brightest girl in the world, and she was born a lover. 

Gwindor, son of Guilin, had scales tarnished by fire and pain. The light his brother had set in him was something else now, and Finduilas put her heart into raising the ashes that spilled between his ribs when she looked at him. 

“I regret that I can’t replace what you have given me,” Gwindor told her. 

“It’s alright,” said Finduilas. She hardly felt the empty places from which she took the light to give to others. Her wounds healed themselves, anyway— it was all love, love, and she was an amplifier that never ran down. 

Not until much later, when the people who wore her scales like shields around their hearts were taken and broken and killed, and there was not enough love to fill the holes left behind. 

She changed her name. Or really, changed which name she went by on a regular basis. It wasn’t as if the friends who always called her Finduilas or Faelivrin were alive anymore, and Gil-galad was as good a name as any. It marked her as the giving type, and she found that she wanted that, wanted to sink her pain into healing others. She went to the Havens, realm of survivors, and there she bit off more than she could chew. 

Nargothrond could only hold so much grief, but the rivers and the sea ran with it, and there were so many people who had lost their light that Gil-galad found herself trying to be a bulwark against an onrushing tide. 

It was not a job for one little fish, looking up a waterfall and wondering what it would take to swim it. But what choice, Gil-galad asked herself, did she even have? She couldn’t stop trying, or she wouldn’t stop trying, and so she rebuilt people’s defenses with bright little shards of her own and tried not to think too hard about it. 

She almost didn’t notice her own flickering will, but the princess fish was watched by many, and noticed by a few, and taken aside by one who had the means to help. 

Círdan took her hand. He was a slow-burning fire, and she could see the silver glow of the scales he had left to give. 

He gave Gil-galad one. Made her take it, really. 

“I am not your lord,” she protested. “There is nothing you need to give me.” 

“Yes, well,” said Círdan, “who am I to ignore someone with a dark space that must be filled? I’m sure you know the feeling. But my heart is growing faint, and I’m sure you know that one, too.” 

“I do,” said Gil-galad. She felt the reassuring shine of Círdan’s scale, and thanked him with a deep bow and then a hug that she had almost been able to suppress in the name of propriety. 

“You’re young,” said Círdan, “and you have much to do. May this rekindle your fëa enough that you may succeed, for I can no longer fill this role.”  
“I don’t want to think about it yet,” said Gil-galad. 

“It’s okay,” said Círdan. “It isn’t something you think about.” 

He was right, she knew. Gil-galad had been a rainbow fish in the solemn halls of Nargothrond, and the give and take was as natural as breathing. But now she was breathing underwater, breathing for the remnant of a city. 

_I was made for this,_ thought Gil-galad. _All I need is a little bit of help._

 

Celebrimbor, ever the master craftsman, could send scales in messages, in the words he sent by envoys and mailbirds. Gil-galad read his letters by the window in the sea-breeze, and the light made her fingers tingle where they touched the paper, warmth running from her skin to her heart. 

_Thank you,_ she wrote back. _I’ll never understand how you’ve gotten your words to carry so much emotion, and I needed it. I can only hope to achieve the same thing one day._

When the reply came, it said _you already have._

Círdan’s gift rekindled flame in Gil-galad’s heart, and Celebrimbor’s words stoked it higher, and when the news of Doriath came, she was ready. The little girl with the Silmaril was wreathed in the scales of the dead who had loved her, and Gil-galad added one on behalf of the living, and then more, and yet more as Elwing grew up. 

She gave scales to the survivors, one to each to heal the pain of the slaying of their kin and king. She had enough for this, and hoped war would not test her limits again. And then Gondolin fell, and Gil-galad became High King with scales in her crown and scales over the wounds that the people of the walled city bore. 

The sons of Fëanor sent a message that chilled her to the core. They knew, they knew about the Silmaril, and they would not come and claim it, but Gil-galad knew it would not last. The words of Maedhros were too clipped and too vehement to be anything but a desperate bid for agency. 

Gil-galad sent a scale back. Maybe it would slow the flame of the Oath as it crept down its long fuse towards destruction. 

“You’ll give to anyone,” observed Círdan when the message was gone. Gil-galad shrugged one shoulder, and her smile was a thousand years in the past. 

“Maybe,” she said. 

It wasn’t enough. It seemed nothing was enough anymore, and the sons of Fëanor rode to battle and away from it before Gil-galad could intervene. 

Ah, well, she thought, what could she ever do? Maybe it was her lot in life to patch up after others. (But there were no scales that would undo death.)

They took Elwing’s sons. Gil-galad could feel that Elrond and Elros were alive— somewhere out there, they wore her scales and their hearts still beat. She couldn’t find them, but they were returned on their own in time, having grown too fast in the thunder of war. Gil-galad noticed, with some surprise, that they bore the scales of Maedhros and Maglor. 

_Two children who bring out the best in others, she thought._ Maybe they were amplifiers, too. Maybe they could replace Gil-galad one day. And then the war went on. 

 

Elrond became Gil-galad’s herald. Immortal and bright-eyed and clear-voiced, he did not follow the path of his brother. That path diverged, became glory and power and kindness and then death, and all the scales Elros had received winked out at once. 

There was a strange sense of asymmetry to the world, then, which had lost one twin and not the other. None felt it so keenly as the twin not lost. 

Gil-galad went to see him. They’d grown close enough over the years to share pain and happiness, something that had become harder to come by as the world shrunk and bent under the weight of griefs uncountable. 

“My dear,” said Gil-galad, “what is it that you need?” 

She already knew. She wondered if Elrond saw it the way she did, like glitter left behind by shoals of fish as they ran from doom in the open sea. 

“I don’t know if I can be helped,” whispered Elrond. 

“You can always be helped,” said Gil-galad. “And I will always help you.” 

She took Elrond’s hand and pressed another scale into his palm, where it burned bright with her promise. 

“You are not less for grief,” she said. She willed warmth into his fingertips, into his hands, into his heart. The fire spread, and he let her hold him, and she thought _still got it, then._

And she did, and Elrond healed in her company although he had lost that of his brother, but she did not know for how much longer. 

Celebrimbor sent two Rings to Gil-galad. They were not single scales but many, not meant for one person but for everyone in the vicinity, and when she received them, Gil-galad knew Celebrimbor would die. A last gift, beautiful and painful in its finality. 

She cried for him even though she knew it would do nothing. And then Eregion burned. Gil-galad didn’t wear her Ring on her finger, as she’d been told it wasn’t yet safe, but under her armor, it rested near her heart. 

With Sauron defeated, there was peace for a time, and less need of Gil-galad’s help, but she was tired. And she was _scared._ She was running out of scales, slowly but surely, and they were not coming back even in the relative happiness of years without war. 

It took her too long to figure out why. She had admiration and success and peace, but the love that turned itself into multicolored fish-mail had died with the last of those who knew that Gil-galad needed its light. She was living in a sea of friendly faces, and she had never felt so far adrift. 

There was Círdan, but he had survived by building walls, and Gil-galad was loath to break them. There was Elrond, but he had his own struggles, and Gil-galad couldn’t bring herself to ask for anything from him. She was not supposed to take. She was supposed to give. 

Ereinion Gil-galad was a tired, tired fish. She wanted to swim home. She had been made for this, but had not been meant to face it alone. 

It was wrong, it felt all wrong, and she had to leave. 

She called upon the one she would miss most. 

“I want you to have the Ring,” said Gil-galad. She folded Elrond’s fingers over the piece of Celebrimbor’s heart that was now too linked with sorrow to be any help to Gil-galad. Hopefully, for Elrond, it would not carry the same pain. 

“What?” said Elrond. “No, I couldn’t.” 

“Of course you could,” said Gil-galad. “I think it’ll be better with you, anyhow.” 

At nightfall, Gil-galad pushed a boat into the water. Behind her was the reassuring light of the last of her bright scales, the ones she had given to Elrond and that would hopefully fit him as well as they had fit her. They would become his, in time, or so Gil-galad hoped. And one day, he would have enough to give. 

And so Gil-galad sailed, away from the Western shore, towards the searchlight across the sea that she now hardly had the will to reflect. She did not say goodbye. 

But a storm rose off the water and into the sky, fog and lightning blurring the lines between sea and dark sky, and Gil-galad’s boat was tossed from wave to wave, back East, throwing her into salty depths and finally spitting her out sodden and gasping on the shore. 

Gil-galad dragged herself back home before the sun came up, and she thought _I am the only fish in Arda who has lost the right to swim._

 

“You look unwell,” said Elrond the next morning. 

“I feel fine,” said Gil-galad. The scrapes from being rolled through seawater crowded with broken planks and then repeatedly slammed against the sandy coast by waves were already beginning to heal, at least. 

“Is it this?” asked Elrond, quietly. He held up the hand that bore the ring, the final scale, and down his arm all the way to his heart Gil-galad knew there were yet more scales, hers and others, given out of love and care over a thousand years and more. 

“Do you need it back? Would that help?” His voice was painfully concerned. 

And Gil-galad said no. 

It might have helped. Just one scale, to jump-start the spark that Gil-galad had kept alive until she had given it away too many times and it was gone. But she had a suspicion that it wouldn’t be enough to receive the echo of something she herself had given. 

“Alright,” said Elrond uncertainly, and Gil-galad sighed. Elrond would cross her readily on matters of strategy, and she was glad in his confidence and skill, but in questions of emotion he was less willing to push. She didn’t like lying to him, and she hated the expression that lingered on his face as he turned away. 

Gil-galad reached out, meaning to do something about it, then stopped. 

The innate ability to brighten and to heal had been flickering for a long time, and Gil-galad had a heavy feeling in her chest that suggested it was gone for the moment, if not for good. There was one thing she could still try to do, though. 

“Don’t worry about me,” said Gil-galad. She put all her energy into trying to make it sound truthful, confident, like she believed it. Like before. “I’m alright, Elrond. Really.” 

There was a needle-sharp light in Elrond’s eyes when he turned back around. The denial had made it fair game to push harder, and Gil-galad cursed herself and Elrond’s perceptiveness. 

“I want to talk about it later, then, if not now,” said Elrond. 

“I never can deny you,” said Gil-galad. And she couldn’t. She hoped that maybe Elrond would forget, but he didn’t, and never would. He sought Gil-galad out, Ring glowing on his finger, and they sat on a balcony overlooking the Sea that Gil-galad couldn’t bear the thought of. She kept her eyes on Elrond, away from the vast expanse of emptiness between herself and the possibility of healing. 

“What did you want to talk about,” Gil-galad said. Her voice fell flat. 

“You,” said Elrond. 

“There’s nothing that needs discussion,” said Gil-galad. She knew where discussion would lead, but even if she could find the words to tell Elrond what had been happening for years upon years, there was nothing to be done. 

“Are you sure?” Elrond was saying. He went to take off the Ring, like its power would do anything against the dimming of the light. Gil-galad stopped him. 

“I cannot be helped,” she said, “and besides, that is a gift that I cannot take back. It wouldn’t be the same.” 

“You can always be helped,” disagreed Elrond. “And I will—” his hand closed over Gil-galad’s— “always help you.” 

There was a silver feeling where their hands touched, like something molten in Gil-galad’s veins. A crescent burning hot and cold, something shining, something colorful. Gil-galad looked up, met the eyes of her protégé, and knew that he had grown faster and fairer than she had ever guessed he would. She smiled, accepted Elrond’s offer of a hug, let its warmth and the feeling of new life wash away the lingering feeling of sea salt on her skin. 

“Elrond Peredhel,” she said, “you are a beautiful fish.”

**Author's Note:**

> it’s honestly your call whether all of that was metaphorical or not. anyway thanks for reading :’)


End file.
